Jane Mayer, The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program. The New Yorker, 13 August 2007. After 11 September 2001 a secret C.I.A. program was started “in which terrorist suspects…were detained in ‘black sites’–secret prisons outside the United States–and subjected to unusually harsh treatment.” [Read more…]
February 18, 2007
Walter Reed and Beyond: Exposé of the harsh conditions for injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
Dana Priest and Anne Hull, Walter Reed and Beyond. The Washington Post, numerous articles published between 18 February and 2 December 2007. “Walter Reed and Beyond follows the care and treatment of the men and women who came home from battle in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It examines the promises made, and the reality lived, in the aftermath of war.”
Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Winner of the 2007 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.
Winner of the 2008 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting.
November 18, 2005
The Man Who Sold the [Iraq] War
James Bamford, The Man Who Sold the War. Rolling Stone, 18 November 2005. (Available on Common Dreams.) Democracy Now!, 21 November 2005: “Investigative journalist James Bamford examines how the Bush administration and Iraqi National Congress used the PR firm Rendon Group to feed journalists — including Judith Miller — fabricated stories in an effort to sell the [Iraq] war.”
February 18, 2005
Behind the walls of Ward 54 at Walter Reed Hospital with Iraq war combat veterans
Mark Benjamin, Behind the walls of Ward 54. Salon, 18 February 2005. “They’re overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them.”
February 14, 2005
Outsourcing Torture: The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program
Jane Mayer, Outsourcing Torture: The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program. The New Yorker, 14 February 2005. “On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.”
May 10, 2004
Torture at Abu Ghraib: [US] soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?
Seymour Hersh, Torture at Abu Ghraib. The New Yorker, 10 May 2004. “A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February [2004]. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system [at Abu Ghraib] were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community….”
Excerpts from story:
Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing: Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”…
As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority…
April 25, 2001
One Awful Night in Than Phong, Vietnam
Gregory L. Vistica, One Awful Night in Thanh Phong. The New York Times Magazine, 25 April 2001. “Senator Bob Kerrey’s hands trembled slightly as he began to read six pages of documents that had just been handed to him. It was late 1998; the papers were nearly 30 years old. On the face of it, they were routine “after action” combat reports of the sort filed by the thousands during the Vietnam War. But Kerrey knew the pages held a personal secret — of an event so traumatic that he says it once prompted fleeting thoughts of suicide.
Pulling the documents within inches of his eyes, he read intently about his time as a member of the Navy Seals and about a mission in 1969 that somehow went horribly wrong. As an inexperienced, 25-year-old lieutenant, Kerrey led a commando team on a raid of an isolated peasant hamlet called Thanh Phong in Vietnam’s eastern Mekong Delta. While witnesses and official records give varying accounts of exactly what happened, one thing is certain: around midnight on Feb. 25, 1969, Kerrey and his men killed at least 13 unarmed women and children. The operation was brutal; for months afterward, Kerrey says, he feared going to sleep because of the terrible nightmares that haunted him.
December 6, 1993
The Truth of El Mozote, El Salvador
Mark Danner, The Truth of El Mozote. The New Yorker, 6 December 1993. “In a remote corner of El Salvador, investigators uncovered the remains of a horrible crime — a crime that Washington had long denied. The villagers of El Mozote had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the Salvadoran Army’s anti-Communist crusade. The story of the massacre at El Mozote — how it came about, and why it had to be denied — stands as a central parable of the Cold War.”
June 13, 1971
Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement
Neil Sheehan, Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement. The New York Times, 13 June 1971. “A massive study of how the United States went to war in Indochina, conducted by the Pentagon three years ago, demonstrates that four administrations progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non- Communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the North to protect the South, and an ultimate frustration with this effort–to a much greater extent than their public statements acknowledged at the time.”